Belloc’s ideal of the good social order is not a utopia. The “proprietary state,” as he calls it, is the natural order of things for men, and only the parochialism of a vision that cannot see beyond the last century on the Continent, or beyond the Reformation in England, would insist on viewing industrial capitalism and the consequent Communist or Collectivist dreariness as advances beyond the simple humanist order that meshes so beautifully with human nature. In his final books, written just before the catastrophe of World War II, Belloc declared that Denmark and Ireland, and the Portugal of Salazar, were the most decent states within which man could find his personal and social perfection. In contemporary cultural theory, there are a number of parallels to Belloc’s distributist or proprietary ideal. In the United States a similar conception can be found in the thought of the Southern Critics. In England, Mr. T. S. Eliot has advanced a like doctrine in his _Notes Toward the Definition of Culture_. Both men conceive of culture as fundamentally traditional, i.e. organic. Both see culture as dual: in one dimension it is familial and private; the attachment of the individual to his ancestral home and to the proven ways of doing things assures a rhythmic continuity to society that expresses itself in local patriotism and the love for the place which is one’s own; status rather than contract is the ideal, for in status is to be found peace, both personal and public; on another dimension culture is public, and the plurality of economic life is given a unity which flowers in political, artistic, and religious life. However, two radical divergencies in the thought of Eliot and Belloc decisively separate their respective humanisms. Eliot’s society is aristocratic and post-Reformation English in inspiration; Belloc’s is either democratic or monarchical, and therefore egalitarian, which is to say that it is Latin and Catholic in spirit. Eliot sees religious conflicts as making for a richer cultural diversity. For Belloc the Reformation and the rending of Christendom is the greatest scandal in the story of the West.